Number of missing Kosovars is challenged
By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff and Louise D. Palmer Globe Correspondent,
04/21/99
ASHINGTON - Experts in surveillance
photography, wartime propaganda, and
Balkan diplomacy say there is every reason to
believe that atrocities are being committed against
the ethnic Albanian majority in strife-torn Kosovo,
but little reason at this time to accept the huge
numbers of dead and missing Kosovars that are
being bandied about.
The US State Department said Monday that a half
million ethnic Albanian men are unaccounted for in
the disputed province, which is part of
Serb-dominated Yugoslavia but 90 percent
Albanian, and a department spokesman hinted
that 100,000 may have met with foul play. The
statements have stoked public outrage, but they
are based on no publicly available documents or photographs.
''In all these cases, the first numbers we hear are overestimates,'' said
Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in photography from space who directs Boston
University's Center for Remote Sensing.
''I am surprised we are not seeing more of what is on the ground. There must
be more'' that US officials could show, El-Baz added. ''Sensing equipment is
now at a state that should make these things more obvious and more
certain.''
In the 28 days since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in what was
portrayed as an effort to stop attacks on and expulsions of Kosovar
Albanians, several instances of misinformation have sparked questioning of
the information being released by alliance and US officials.
After Yugoslavia charged that a refugee convoy had been bombarded by
NATO jets, US General Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of NATO,
spun the story around, blaming Yugoslav forces for an attack that killed
dozens of civilians. Clark then retracted the statement, and NATO took
responsibility for hitting civilians.
In the same incident, the Pentagon released a taped interview with an
American pilot purportedly involved in the bombing, but it turned out that the
pilot was describing a different mission.
NATO and the State Department have repeatedly said that they had
evidence that members of the Albanian intelligentsia were being executed.
While some of those named were indeed killed, others turned up alive.
Among them was Baton Haxhiu, who reportedly heard himself pronounced
dead by NATO officials in Brussels. Haxhiu, the editor of the independent
ethnic Albanian paper, Koha Ditore, was alive and in hiding.
US and NATO officials have repeatedly asserted they had evidence that
Yugoslav forces are committing crimes against humanity and committing
mass genocide. This week, they said, these forces had dug mass graves
pointing in the direction of Mecca, using a satellite photo to underscore their
point.
''Long neat rows of individual graves, 150 very neatly dug graves - these are
not mass graves,'' said MIT political science professor Barry Posen, a
specialist in the history of warfare. ''It's weird to think they would have a
mass murder, recruit grave diggers, and properly orient the graves toward
Mecca so as to give them some semblance of a proper Muslim burial.''
Posen said hunger for news has led to nearly unquestioning acceptance of
official statements and superficial appearances by the Western media,
allowing the politicians and generals leading the air campaign to use the
refugees to justify the bombing.
''Because the press has not gone back to investigate and dispel 'facts' that
were staked out at the beginning that said there were already hundreds of
thousands of refugees,'' Posen said, ''NATO is able to absolve itself and
make great use of very tragic pictures of people in very tragic circumstances
to say, 'See, this is why we fought the war, to reverse this.'''
Nongovernmental specialists and analysts contacted about the various
NATO claims uniformly said they believe atrocities are occurring, and
stressed that they do not want to be interpreted as defending or excusing
these acts.
But, said Robert Hayden, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center
for Russian and East European Studies, the State Department reports of
100,000 to 500,000 unaccounted-for Albanian men ''are ludicrous - the
story is just ludicrous.
''NATO is running a propaganda campaign, there's no question about that,''
Hayden said. ''There have been lots of discrepancies in the official story, but
what is interesting is that, until now, there has been amazingly little scrutiny of
that story.''
However, there are other explanations other than propaganda campaigning
for NATO and the United States to hold back on high-altitude or space
photos that could document the location of dead and missing Kosovars.
''When you show a picture, any good expert will know that this photo must
have been taken by a certain type of platform, and that the camera
characteristics are 1, 2, 3, 4,'' El-Baz said. ''Governments do not want to tell
the general public what the detailed capabilities of the sensing equipment are.
And if you show the photo, an expert can make something like it, or try to
evade it.''
Swanee Hunt, who was US ambassador to Austria in the mid-1990s while
the former Yugoslavian republic of Bosnia was the focus of ethnic wars, said
she was looking at pictures of men lined up to be executed and piled into
mass graves long before the photos were ever released publicly.
''The means we have of gathering information are very sophisticated. They
are extraordinarily detailed,'' said Hunt, who runs a public policy program at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. ''But the intelligence community
is very sensitive about their methods ... maybe not because the Serbs are
watching, maybe because the Chinese are.''
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